Matters dropped leaflets over London from an airship emblazoned 'Votes for Women'. Photograph: still from Muriel Mattters!

She has not been much celebrated in her homeland but Muriel Matters – an Australian-born suffragist who achieved notoriety in Britain after pulling off a series of brave and quirky stunts there in the early 1900s – is finally getting the recognition she deserves. New docudrama Muriel Matters!, featuring the suffragette’s story, will premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival on Sunday, 13 October, and will also screen on ABC1 the following Tuesday.

Matters, an actor who left Adelaide for Britain when she was 28 to further her musical career, once sailed over London in an airship emblazoned with “Votes For Women”, dropping leaflets for the militant Women’s Freedom League (WFL).

She was also charged with disorderly conduct and imprisoned after chaining herself to “that vile grille” in the Ladies’ Gallery of the British House of Commons in 1908. Obscuring women’s view of parliamentary debates, the piece of ironwork was considered a sign of female oppression.

And yet the South Australian has gone relatively unrecognised in her birth country. Frances Bedford MP, the secretary of The Muriel Matters Society, which was founded four years ago in Australia, thinks that part of the problem is that Matters didn’t do much for the franchise in her birth country – not least because women in Australia got the vote earlier than women in Britain.

The suffragist, who was also a lecturer, elocutionist and journalist, called Britain home from 1905, by which point most Australian states had granted many women, although not Aboriginal women, the right to vote.

“While in UK, she was from the colonies, and as not one of the Pankhurst people, she was outside their recognition,” says Bedford. “Also, as one of the WFL people, she was against the war – another problem at the time – and she married a divorced person, who seems to have left his wife for her."

Matters in fact turned down dentist William Arnold Porter three times. She finally married him in 1914, only when the suffrage campaign was put on ice for a while, points out Elizabeth Crawford, author of The Women’s Suffrage Movement.

Women got the vote earlier in Australia than in Britain, part of the reason Matters was overlooked. Photograph: still from Muriel Matters!

During her time in Britain, Matters lived in Kennington, south London. She died in Hastings, where she stood unsuccessfully for election as an MP and where a where a plaque today honours her. Bedford recently visited the town and other locations in Britain on a Matters promotional tour.

While the Australian may have been a “cog in the wheel” during the British suffrage campaign, Crawford argues that she was an “important one in a way because of the fact that she was a vote-carrying woman”. This could also explain why the suffragist didn't become a household name back home. “Those women had the vote in Australia. I don’t know if they were greatly concerned about what was going on over here in this backward realm,” she says.

Crawford argues that Matters is “more of a role model than the window breakers”, and describes Emily Wilding Davison, who died after being trampled upon by King George V's horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913, as a “bit of a one-off”.

Martyrdom is not the only way by which to measure these campaigning women. “Muriel Matters I find rather more appealing. You don’t have to die,” says Crawford. “There was Muriel doing her stunts but in a more lighthearted way.”

Matters came to the attention of V. Irene Cockroft, a Brisbane-born writer who herself sailed to London in 1960 when she was researching the British suffrage campaign. Although Matters grew up in a country less shackled by the trappings of the class system than Britain, Cockroft says, the Australian press was largely conservative during Matters’ life – which might help explain why she wasn’t much celebrated in her homeland.

“Far from being amused, British expats might be offended by coverage of an upstart Australian woman’s attack on the British ‘Mother of Parliaments’", says Cockroft, who is the great-niece of suffrage artist Ernestine Mills. “One might almost call the Australian attitude to the mother country at the time ‘the colonial cringe’."

Prophets tend to be honoured only after they are safely dead, says Cockroft. “Now would be a good time for Australia to claim Muriel as a true-blue heroine.”